Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday January 24, 2014 @08:47AM
from the time-to-rewrite-some-books dept.

ananyo writes "Stephen Hawking has proposed a new solution to the black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years. The paradox troubles physicists because if the firewall scenario is correct, Einstein's general theory of relativity is flouted. But the classical theory black hole cannot be reconciled to the quantum mechanical prediction that energy and information can escape from a black hole. Now Hawking has proposed a tantalizingly simple solution to the paradox which allows both quantum mechanics and general relativity to remain intact — black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause spacetime to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist. As Hawking writes in his paper, 'The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.'"

Hawking:...this means, in a sense, that there are no black holes. Only what I call "Hawking surfaces".
Layman: Does this mean it's possible to travel faster than the speed of light?
Hawking: Sure, why not.

There are no black holes until we find one. All we have so far is that we ran out of alternative ideas, so we assume the supermassive compact object in the centers of galaxies are black holes. That is actually not quite true, there is an alternative to general relativity in the vicinity of black holes:http://www.worldscientific.com... [worldscientific.com]

Wait for the results of the Event Horizon Telescope this/next year. Then we will know which one is right: http://www.eventhorizontelesco... [eventhoriz...escope.org]

So, you think Hawking is attention-grabbing because somebody else said they are, "Hawking Surfaces"? Come on.

Hawking is a well-respected scientist who still does good work in theoretical physics. And this paper is quite good. It is a pretty radical re-thinking of black holes that, if it holds up to further scrutiny, will be considered a very important insight.

I don't think that people will stop calling these objects black holes, but he is absolutely correct in that if this idea holds up, it is a statemen

Nope, he was arguing that quantum physics is wrong and black holes don't emit information - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
Now it seems this is pretty much settled - they do, the question is only how.

Scientific reasoning is justification that there is no evidence for a god.

No scientific evidence. It is an improper extension of the scientific method to claim that everything* that lacks scientific evidence therefore does not or cannot exist.

*Obviously, science can make such a claim about many things: anything that you would expect their to be scientific evidence for (i.e. anything natural) can be proven by science to not exist based on a lack of evidence. However, something that is strictly and purely supernatural (which God is pre-eminently) is by the very definition of the w

No scientific evidence. Fine, I accept that; scientific evidence is exactly what I would need in order to believe there is a god. Needing anything less seems crazy to me.

However, something that is strictly and purely supernatural (which God is pre-eminently) is by the very definition of the word "supernatural" beyond having a nature that science can speak about.

Oh, man, that old argument. By that reasoning, I had better be on the lookout for ghosts, fairies, goblins, magic unicorns and all manner of supernatural beings? Do you ever try walking through walls just in case it might work? Nobody can prove you don't have that supernatural ability.

It is an improper extension of the scientific method to claim that everything* that lacks scientific evidence therefore does not or cannot exist.

I was very careful to not claim that. To have done so would be stupid. For the same reason, you can not disprove that I am riding a pink unicorn on the moon, although I would hazard a guess that you'd think that be extremely unlikely.

So you're saying science can be improved over time, taking new evidence into account to provide a more accurate understanding of how the universe works? That's a good point; it's very much the opposite to religion that continues to hold fast to myth and legend.

Christianity is not opposed to science. Please stop propagating this incorrect view. Go ahead and take issue with individuals who oppose science for personal or religious reasons, but it's plain ignorance to generalize.

When I hear people say things like this, it instantly raises a red flag to be cautious of what so-called reasoning and observations this person attempts to convey. Is it possible that their lack of reasoning and failure to observe reality cloud their other assessments as well?

There is huge variety within the Christian religion. Quaker, Roman Catholic, Pentacostal, Amish, Russian Orthodox, Mormon, Coptic, Presbyterian, Christian Scientist, and the newer "non-demoninational" churches all count. It's really hard to characterize them all beyond the very basics.

There are certainly people who call themselves Christian, and reject science. There are also people who call themselves American, and reject religion. It's no more accurate to say Christians are opposed to science than to say Americans are opposed to religion.

Because you're misrepresenting religion. In the case of Christianity (specifically because it was mentioned by name in the sub-thread), it limited itself to only saying "This is how you should behave" for only approximately 29 years when all of its adherents were Jewish.

Because religious people desperately want evidence that they can wave in the face of non believers to try to get them into their club. They will blindly refuse any evidence that doesn't agree with them of course. They're a bit like corporation funded researchers.

"Except that they aren't. Religion says "This is how you should behave". Science says "This is how things work and why.""

Except that's not what religion says. It not only say "that's how you should behave" but it also says "that's what you should take for certain" and there you have the conflict with science... unless, of course, we are talking about the Very True Religion because, in that case, whatever verifiable assertion it produces, happens also to be scientifically verifiable in the same sense.

Indeed, many specific religions go two steps further even than that. They begin with a self-referential statement affirming the perfect truth of the religious scripture, which is true because it is part of the religious scripture. Then, as you say, anything that is contained in that religious scripture is perfectly true, by definition, no matter how apparently internally inconsistent (contradictions within the scripture), externally inconsistent (contradictions with simple matters of fact derived from reason and observation), morally inconsistent (contradictions with accepted morality, e.g. is or isn't slavery good, is marriage by rape and a payment of 50 shekels morally acceptable, is it morally just to slaughter Midianite women and children except for the young female virgins and to subject them to rape and slavery, should we kill old women accused of being witches given that there is no such thing as an actual witch).

Since some of these things offend mere common sense to an enormous extent, religion has invented "hermeneutics" and "exegesis" as complex forms of interpretation of scriptural text whose sole purpose is to reduce the extreme cognitive dissonance induced by trying to believe that A and Not A are simultaneously true when they happen to be written in a religious text. Doublethink is alive and well and living in a religion near you.

The second step that they add is that in ordinary discourse and the usual scientific investigative process that we used to systematically refine a consistent set of beliefs in reasonable agreement with evidence, the only penalties associated with being wrong are natural ones that consistently fit in with the general framework of the scientific worldview -- if you fail to believe that the law of gravitation will apply to you and step off of the roof of a tall building, it is likely to be the last experiment you ever perform (likely in a specific and defensible sense, since of course it might always be the case that you have been sprinkled with fairy dust or have accomplished a sufficiently strong belief in The Force that the force of gravity does not cause you to splatter at the bottom of a long drop, it has just never been observed to be the case and is hence very unlikely from a Bayesian point of view at least). In the religious worldview, however, there is an entire hidden world where things happen that we cannot observe but that are precisely and correctly delineated in the aforementioned scripture. It is a second issue because religion makes many pronouncements on matters that cannot ever be contradicted by experience -- indeed, it revels in this and claims it as its "higher" ground.

So when a divinely inspired, perfectly true (if only after massive "interpretation") religious scripture tells you that if you fail to believe that every word in that scripture that the scripture itself assures you is perfectly true is, in fact, true, you will be cast into a fiery pit so that your skin can be burned off of your living body and then instantly regrown to be burned off again, repeated to infinity and beyond, it is self-consistently guaranteed to be true. The Quran tells us so. The New Testament tells us so perhaps a bit less graphically. The general texts of Hinduism assure us that unbelievers who fail to obey its precepts will be reincarnated as intestinal parasites living in a dog or the like.

The core of most scripture-based religious belief is, in fact, supernatural posthumous extortion in the form of events that cannot ever be objectively verified but that are so extreme that they tempt even the rational to make Pascal's Wager, coupled with a system of equally unverifiable posthumous rewards for those who meekly acquiesce in the entire ball of scriptural wax and the consequent transfer of political power, social status, and wealth to the priesthood tasked with "interpreting" the very scriptures that, after all, are perfectly true. They say so, and if you don't believe (perhaps because yo

While I have not cross-checked this myself, I understand that the biblical age of the universe can be calculated from the begats. That trail of Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel who (with apparently the help of some nephilum) begat a whole bunch of kids was, at the time it was recorded, the only way of documenting time spans longer than a century. Quite an invention, really.

Nonsense. Religion is based on faith. Myth, legend, and anecdotes exist to provide a means to contemplate one's faith. In the context of religion, "truth" means "that which I accept on faith to be true" and nothing more. Unfortunately, dogmatic zealots (both religious and otherwise) project their faith on others. That is the problem with religion.

On the other hand, people treat science as some kind of infallible process. That eventually, an answer will be found if we try hard enough. That science has a monopoly on truth. In reality, science has several fundamental limitations.

1. It assumes everything that exists is observable by humans -- directly or indirectly. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be observed.

2. It assumes everything that exists is measurable by humans -- that it can be somehow quantified and tested. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be measured.

3. It assumes everything that exists is comprehensible by humans. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be comprehended by human intelligence.

We can work around the first two, usually with spherical cows [wikipedia.org]. That last one is a major problem, however. Personally, I think it is the height of hubris to believe that the universe is obligated to exist and behave in a form that humans can observe and measure, let alone that intelligence is capable of understanding. There is no way a dog would understand even basic chemistry. Why do we assume humanity is not so limited?

I really like Wikipedia's opening line on science:“Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.”

I also like the opening monologue from “Haloween on Military Street”:“We measure things by what we are.To the maggots in the cheese, the cheese is the universe.To the worms in the corpse, the corpse is the cosmos.How, then, can we be so cocksure about our our world?Just because of our

1. That which cannot be observed by definition cannot affect our universe, so it is inconsequential. If it has an effect on our universe - which includes humans and human thoughts and feelings etc. - then it is observable.

2. This is just another way of saying the 1st, unless you propose that there are observable things that are not measurable.

3. This is true, but that's a fundamental limitation on all human endeavours, not just science. It applies equally well to anything, including religion, so practic

An acceptable premise. Prove it. All you've done so far is stated that that which is not observable cannot be observed.

Yes. It is a tautology so it needs no proof. I think you don't get the full depth of what it really means, though. It means that literally nothing that can't be observed can ever factor into any sort of reasoning or consideration in any field or endeavor anywhere whatsoever, simply because it has literally zero effect on anything that we might try to do. If something has a non-zero effect then it is observable by that very effect. Of course it's possible there are things we cannot observe now that we might

Personally, I think it is the height of hubris to believe that the universe is obligated to exist and behave in a form that humans can observe and measure, let alone that intelligence is capable of understanding. There is no way a dog would understand even basic chemistry. Why do we assume humanity is not so limited?

Your understanding of science seems to be that of the 19th century. In the 20th century, scientists learned to accept that there are many aspects of the world that are intrinsically unknowable a

Do you fail at Christianity by dismissing the concept of eternity, or at physics by dismissing the second law of thermodynamics?

Not the OP, but you are seriously lacking in imagination if you can't conceive of any way to reconcile those two concepts.

Here's one: God exists outside of our universe. We're a virtual machine and God is the hypervisor. When we die our process is copied from one virtual machine to another which may have a radically different architecture.

Look, philosophers and the like say that there is no spoon, just the concept of a spoon. But somehow no one ever says that the soup is an illusion or just a mere concept... [borrowed shamelessly from T.Pratchett]

Should be easy enough. Find the base discrete unit that measures time (eg the smallest step in time you can make), and the base discrete unit of distance. If the speed of light, measured by those units, is 4,294,967,296, then you're living in a simulation.

FFS Slow Down Cowboy!
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The event horizon oscillates faster than the speed of light over a greater distance than quantum tunneling can occur. Inbound light would follow the wavefront in, only to become trapped as the next wave built outside its escape range.

No, at least according to Occam's browser plugin which states that any scientific theory first proposed in the comment section of a website is probably complete crap.

Or in this case, the second one, which follows herein forthwith.

Maybe black holes distort gravity severely but end up distorting space so badly they twist it right 'round where it was, essentially making the black holes invisible but appearing to have mass. Hey! I discovered what all the Dark Matter is! (waits for Nobel Committee to call...)

My sense, in reading a considerable number of articles about astrophysics, etc, is that we are in a period which is awaiting the next big breakthrough in knowledge, along the lines of what Newton and Einstein produced. There are still too many unknowns and ambiguities that need to be resolved by discovering a piece of the puzzle which we don't even know exists yet, and I think people are still trying to get their heads wrapped about quantum physics. That said, I'm not a physicist, just an interested lay person, so I may be wrong in that summation, but it seems many of the discussions occurring these days at least pay a backhanded nod to that sort of notion.

There's also a discrepancy involving the size of the proton. Measuring the size two different ways gives two different results, which is unpossible. There must be something going on during these experiments that we don't understand yet.

It's been a tricky one since no one was able to convince themselves it wasn't just measurement error for a long time, but the most recent results seem to say it's real - and no one can propose a good explanation as to why.

How long, I wonder, shall we have to wait? There was rapid scientific progress in the 19th and 20th centuries, but when looking at the longer timescales, that is an aberration. For most of history technological progress was slow and rare, and the next millenium may just as likely to be similar to the 500-1500 period, when nothing much happened.

In this picture, there would still be astrophysical black holes in every meaningful sense of the word, i.e. condensed objects from which light would not escape. Such objects would have an "apparent horizon", which can be defined locally by the property that all lightlike geodesics are ingoing.

What these black-hole-like objects would not have is an Event Horizon, which is a global property of the spacetime, and is only defined by the behavior at asymptotic infinity. It's a neat resolution of the whole mess: way more sensible than firewalls.

But it's still just hand-waving -- note that the entire argument relies on AdS/CFT, which assumes the black holes are embedded in de Sitter space, which has a negative cosmological constant and is most definitely not the kind of spacetime we live in. And AdS/CFT is itself an unproven conjecture, although it is supported by many specific example cases. Until somebody comes up with a theory of quantum gravity, this stuff is all guesswork. Caveat emptor.

I don't see anywhere in the Science article making the argument that there black holes do not exist. Only that Event Horizons do not exist. So, why the claim that black holes to no exist? Why not just say they don't exist in the context we once thought?

The actual paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761 [arxiv.org]. People have suggested informally ideas somewhat similar to this one before, but Hawking proposal seems to actually have the math behind it. Possibly most importantly, he can show that his predictions are a consequence of gauge/gravity duality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence [wikipedia.org]. This suggests that this may be a testale consequence of certain string theories if one could observe a black hole under the right conditions and see that it only was pretending to be a black hole.

Now we need another world-famous scientist to publish a paper claiming that there is no such thing as "leveraging our core competencies to provide added value to our internal and external customers within the new paradigms posed by cloud services" and I can die a happy man!

That is an elegant solution that is far more consistent than the "absolute" limits so loved by many. It also points out that our understanding of Quantum Mechanics in reality (as opposed to theory) is pretty incomplete and fuzzy.

Once physicists realized the speed of light was finite, you could conceive of density and radius that exceeded the speed of light. Einsteins special realtivity showed that Maxwells equations implied light speed as a maximal speed in the universe, so this radius then became a barrier.

I don't think it is, no. But I do think he overstates his case somewhat. For me, the left eyebrow is raised by the need for huge quantities of "dark matter" in order to account for large scale structure of galaxies even though studies of our local region of space show no such matter exists (or is required to explain it). Now OK, if they discover some WIMPs in future I will hold my hands up, but right now being sceptical is the correct position to take on this. And if WIMPs don't exist, well, the predictions of GR won't match observation so at the very least it will need modification.

This is all notwithstanding the fact that physics simply describes the regularities of experience and apparently gives different answers to the same question depending on how that question is posed. It's still amusing to me that mathematics cannot even deal with the 3-body problem in Newtonian Mechanics adequately without resorting to perturbation methods. Then there's the regularisation issue in Quantum Theory, where infinities magically cancel each other out.

I am not a physicist, but I reiterate the need for scepticism everywhere and at all times. It's possible to be sceptical and also have "wow" moments when physicists come up with genuinely new ideas. I do sometimes wonder just how primitive our current bleeding edge ideas will look to our distant descendents.

Dark matter is required to account for the structure of our galaxy. Sans dark matter, there is not enough observed mass by an order of magnitude in our galaxy to account for the observed galactic rotation curve.

"Unseen matter" is actually the softball bet their, as opposed to the idea that somehow - and nobody really knows or has ever seen how - gravity works differently over long distances. It's just the unseen matter has to have specific properties to fit with observation.

I always hear about this galactic rotation curve. I understand that there are other observations that seem to point the way to there being extra matter also, but the curve idea give rise to a question I have. Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge. Also, the stars at the edge are moving faster, so they have a speed factor to their local time. If time is changing as you move from the center to the edge, then I would not expect things to appear right to someone who calculates how things should look by some computer simulation if the simulated galaxy has consistent time throughout.

The question I have is "Why do they assume that it's simple, and doesn't interact with itself?" Actually, since we're talking about, say, 9/10 of the matter in the universe, why don't we assume that there are 9 non-interacting kinds of dark matter, and that each of those kinds is as diverse as what we think of as normal matter?

Please note, I realize that this isn't in the standard model, but searches based on the standard model haven't been notably successful

Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge

Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.

What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?

That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.

Ahhh?? How come? I mean, it doesn't need to be a "boundary region" per se, the "constant" may vary gradually, within a small percentage and over large distances.

And, except for variation of several orders of magnitude that would bring the electron orbits inside the nucleus, why would "atoms fly apart"? Their orbitals would modify spatially, but I imagine the orbitals' energy could still remain the same.

Yes, light may be stretched/compressed in the same manner it happens within a lens. Wouldn't this explain a "gravitational lensing"?

Without knowing the exact nature of the change your proposing it's hard to estimate what the precise effects would be, but needless to say the fundamental constants varying in a consistent manner over a region of space would still produce dramatic effects. Modifying that changes all sorts of energy levels - parallel plate capacitors which are charged to an energy in one region of space are suddenly not in another. They'd experience forces counter-acting the energy change - and that's an ideal system. In an

You have no idea what you're talking about. GPS has to be resynced because our clocks are imperfect, the path of GPS satellites is imperfect and there are tiny errors introduced by outside forces like the Earth's electromagnetic field. Satellites fail because we are incapable of building perfect, error-free machines. And quantum entanglement has nothing to do with relativity.

Of course Relativity is flawed. The point is that it's far less flawed than Newtonian mechanics. And that so far nobody has yet managed to come up with something even less flawed. That's called science - there no room for Truth, only successively more accurate approximations.

If you have a better theory, please shareit, but it better be able to explain everything explained by Relativity, plus create entirely new predictions confirmed by reality. Otherwise expect to be laughed off the stage.

Lol. Internet hero giving his completely random opinion on relativity. How about some peer reviewed documentation? Even some simple equations would do. Please...point out the exact step in the equations that you think is wrong. Then we'll talk.

It's trivial to show General Relativity is wrong: It doesn't match observations. At the moment a hypothesis (WIMPs) are presented to explain the discrepancy. If WIMPs are not found by experiment, however, then the proposition becomes somewhat different, does it not? Right now GR and Newtonian Mechanics are correct insofar as they're useful for making predictions that turn out through observation to be true, to some degree of accuracy. With GR there's no need for the planet Vulcan to explain the peculia

To the best of my knowledge, WIMPS are postulated to exist due to some prediction of the current model of particle physics. I doubt if GR predicts WIMPS. Of course, I could be wrong and would welcome any corrections.

Relativity is the most proven theory in the history of science. Nearly every physics major that's graduated in the past 80 years has proven out a different part of it in some new and unique way as part of their doctoral thesis. Every observation that's ever been made that seems to contradict it has later been found to be faulty or explained by some other phenomena that we hadn't understood as of yet.

Infinities exist everywhere in nature. They are naturally hard for us to understand because of our species engrained believe in the Birth/Death cycle and we feel it should apply to everything just well as it does to us.

Lastly, you are correct, Relativity will fail eventually. Even Einstein knew this. It explains "how" things work but only in limited condition and scales. Just like how Newtonian physics worked at the Macro level and at speeds and timescales humans could measure at the time it was devised, relativity only works at certain scales. But it does not invalidate the predictions of Newtonian physics, it just expands them. Eventually we will learn more and there will be a new theory that either explains it all, or at least improves on what Newtonian and Relativistic physics has shown us.

Interesting troll. A bit heavy handed, though. If I were to grade it, if it was written by a high school student it would get a C+, if written by a college student, it would rate a D- (barely passing).

Point of interest: the Copenhagen convention suggests that there is no possibility of a physics Out There. That all physicists can do is make mental models of whatever reality might be, and play around with those models, since reality itself is unobservable without the distortions of observer bias. There are some things we think we know, and there are some things that we know that we can never know (such as what is happening in close proximity to a singularity, or why is Pi 3.14159... and not something else). And it turns out that because there are some things that we know we can never know, we can't be sure about any of the things we think we know.

So, yes, AC is completely correct: relativity is wrong. Also quantum mechanics is wrong. Also classical physics is wrong. It is all wrong. So what? Asking whether this stuff is right or wrong is asking the wrong question. The right questions to ask of any physics model are: How useful is it, and what is its scope of usefulness?

We are the tool using monkeys. We are not Gods. Don't sweat the Really Big Stuff. Do something with the tools: make more tools, make some fun toys and games. That's what we do best. And, that's all that we can do.

Newtonian Gravity isn't correct either, we still use it in limited scope.
It doesn't mean that Relativity is prevented from the same usage.

But it is still far from correct and the day people finally accept that and move on, maybe some actual research will get done.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy are literal blackholes of knowledge that rips Relativity apart in every sense of the metaphor.

There is hardly a contradiction, just you putting meaning where there is none.

You know that building you live in? Built with Newtonian mechanics. That's why it stays up.

And the sat-nav in your phone? That uses general relativity. If it didn't, it wouldn't be able to locate you in the right country, let alone on the right street.

Newtonian mechanics and general relativity have been proven correct many times over. What they are though is incomplete. And there's a mountain of research happening right now to work out why.

FYI: Merely the altitude of, say, geostationary orbit implies a potential energy that means you have to account for time dilation if you want to stay in sync with clocks on the ground. This was proven experimentally decades ago, and predicted way before that.

To be honest, if anything physicists might have been inventing phenomena, dimensions and particles a little to zealously to explain the math. Scaling it back a little bit is not the same as denying the existence of things that are easily detectable and testable, like cancer, world hunger, pollution, etc. There's nothing wrong with a little mythology - it's normal when you're on the edge of the map pushing back the "Here Be Dragons!" fog. But although some explanations and hypotheses could be dead on, it's unlikely that they all are.

The problem is that we have no unexplained observations to go off of. You find a particle at CERN these days, it turns out to have been predicted by the Standard Model.

So you come up with a neat way to explain the tiny but important discrepancies, follow the mathematics through and find you now require some additional actors to square away the effects you don't see but would've anyway. Suddenly you've got a bunch of new particles in your hypothesis - all of which are required to make it work. Yet disappoint